Saudi Arabia has secretly offered Russia a sweeping deal to control the global oil market and safeguard Russia's gas contracts, if the Kremlin backs away from the Assad regime in Syria. The revelations come amid high tension in the Middle East, with US, British, and French warship poised for missile strikes in Syria. Iran has threatened to retaliate. The strategic jitters pushed Brent crude prices to a five-month high of $112 a barrel. "We are only one incident away from a serious oil spike. The market is a lot tighter than people think," said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review. Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia's Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides.  Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to break the deadlock over Syria.   Here they are.

Skype began as a very cool service. I used it and recommended it - a lot. Skype (originally Sky peer-to-peer) was a peer to peer voice system, which means that there was no central computer controlling everything. It was also encrypted, though the internal details were never revealed. But, as will a lot of good tech ideas, the developers were persuaded to sell it. In this case, to eBay in 2005. (For $2.5 billion, which is a lot of persuasion!) Then, after doing very little with the tech for several years, eBay sold it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011. That's when the serious trouble began. Here are the highlights:

For my summer holidays I have been mostly reading Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has her faults but, boy, was she prescient.  She wrote it back in the 1950s. One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas, it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand's fictional progressives don't want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed. Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous scare-mongering reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it's unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. As they are attempting to do now in Britain's West Sussex, and have succeeded in doing in New York. Here's a relevant excerpt from Rand.

There's really no more doubt about it, the US government is a Surveillance State, far beyond any East German autocrat's wildest dreams. And it is far, far more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda. We all come from a background that taught us that the Soviet Union and its totalitarian empire was horrifying (which it was), and that the USA was good, noble and pristine. That makes it hard for us to accept that the US has now become what East Germany once was. We keep looking for reasons to not to believe it. So what now?  Your first move is to protect yourself. There's no use in saying much against a surveillance state while they're listening to your every word.  There are two ways to protect yourself:

China's new leaders are close to abandoning the country's one-child policy, belatedly moving to avert an ageing crunch as the work force goes into sharp decline. Jun Ma from Deutsche Bank said the new policies should shore up the pension system and inject stimulus as China's growth sputters. "As tens of millions of sibling-less people in China are now entering their child-bearing age, we expect this policy shift would induce a baby boom," he said. The one-child policy dates back to 1971 in its original form and has led to 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations, often badly executed in poor regions. Recent abuses have caused uproar, with photos circulating on the Chinese internet of a young mother lying beside a fully formed baby after she had been seized by police for failing to pay the "social compensation fee" for an illegal child. She was forced to undergo an abortion just before her natural birth. Premier Li Keqiang clearly views the policy an anachronism at a time when China is running out of workers, and faces a demographic time-bomb. There are currently five workers for every pensioner. This ratio will fall to two by 2035.  So any baby boom over the next few years may come too late.

During the Bastille Day celebrations this month, French President François Hollande declared - to the incredulity of pretty much everyone in France - that "the recovery is here". There are no particular economic indicators that would suggest this. Consumer spending and manufacturing remain at historic lows; growth in the third quarter is expected to be zero; the OECD has predicted that unemployment will actually be worse next year; and only this week a senior member of the FPD, Germany's junior coalition partner, pronounced that he was "very worried" about France, arguing that Hollande's decision to raise taxes was "fundamentally wrong." As an Austrian-American born and raised in Paris, and still living there, I have always been intrigued by the French faith in the French way. No other country - save for the United States - is as persuaded that it embodies a universal model for human societies. But a system whose economic performance is mediocre in times of prosperity and plain lousy in times of crisis can hardly purport to be a "model." And sadly, the same advantages that make the French believe in their system are also what make the country so unprepared for reform. The French, in short, are living in la-la land and their current system is doomed.

Babies got cheaper this month. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilization treatments from $7,500 to below $300. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and lemon juice in place of purified carbon dioxide gas to maintain acidity when growing an embryo in a lab before implanting it. Second, a baby called Connor was born after 13 of his parents' embryos had their genomes analyzed using next-generation DNA-sequencing techniques in an Oxford laboratory. Only three of the embryos were found to have the right chromosome number, and one of these "normal" embryos was then implanted in his mother. This new approach, made possible by the rapidly falling cost of DNA sequencing, promises to cut the number of failures during IVF, reducing both cost and heartache. The two announcements are a reminder that cost reduction and productivity boosts are the purpose of most innovation. Medicine is no exception. Innovation is driving down the costs of medical interventions all the time, and the falls may be about to accelerate, thanks to biotechnology and information technology. Whence, then, the relentless rise in the costs of healthcare? Part of the answer is known as the Jevons paradox after the Victorian economist Stanley Jevons.

When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about "extreme weather." Those who made their living from alarm  switched tactics  to jump on any unusual weather event -- whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood -- and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people -- egged on by journalists -- have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice, with scientists as the weather gods' priests. The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. Even here in mild England, people are always saying, "I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year." One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. "I have never known it so average," I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.

In the US shale gas is old hat; it's the shale oil revolution that's proving a world changer, promising not just lower oil prices worldwide, but geopolitical ripples as America weans itself off oil imports and perhaps loses interest in the Middle East. One of the pioneers of the shale gas revolution, Chris Wright, of Liberty Resources, was in Britain last month. It was he and his colleagues at Pinnacle Technologies who reinvented hydraulic fracturing in the late 1990s in a way that unlocked the vast petroleum resources in shale. Within seven years the Barnett shale, in and around Forth Worth, Texas, was producing half as much gas as the whole of Britain consumes. And the Barnett proved to be a baby compared with other shales. Like many shale entrepreneurs, Mr. Wright is now spending a lot of time in North Dakota drilling for oil. The success of America's shale gas revolution drove the gas price so low that in 2010 most drilling rigs switched to looking for oil. With spectacular results. A new report (The Shale Oil Boom: a US Phenomenon) by Leonardo Maugeri of Harvard University, sets out just how astonishing this second shale revolution already is.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

What is going on in Egypt is simply astounding.  The pictures -such as those of this UPI story, are jaw-dropping.  Especially when you consider what millions upon millions of Egyptians are demonstrating against:  radical Islamism and Sharia law which they equate with fascist tyranny. Who or what is behind these gigantic protests?  An amorphous movement called Tamarod, meaning "Rebel" or "Rebellion" in Arabic.  Its goal is the resignation of President Morsi and the removal of the Moslem Brotherhood from power, followed by new elections. Now, here's what almost no one gets so far:  The Tamarod movement is Egypt's Tea Party.  Both are anti-fascist freedom movements.  Of course, the US Tea Parties have a far deeper and more solid foundation - the US Constitution and the demand for the federal government to limit itself to the Constitution's enumerated powers. Nonetheless, what is happening in Egypt should inspire all Tea Partyers in America.  If tens of millions of Egyptians can demand the resignation of their corrupt fascist leader, why can't tens of millions of Americans do the same? Well, then, why aren't they?  Americans have the greatest tradition of freedom in human history.  Egyptians don't have any at all.  So why aren't vast numbers of Americans in the streets demanding their freedom from the federalie fascisti, led by an irretrievably corrupt president who hates their country?  What does it take? Maybe it takes George Zimmerman getting acquitted.